I have seen this running around LJ and it took awhile but I managed to come up with possibilities. Most of these come with stories.

I am pretty sure that no one who reads my LJ has done any of the following
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Lived in Paris for 2.5 years and Belgium for 1 year.

Stood on stage with the Red Hot Chili Peppers batting plastic beer cups out of the air before they hit the band.

Ran security for a 4Tops concert

Toured as a member of a puppet team

Drove a convertible pickup truck

For the last four driver’s licenses, doing a different character for each (generic Bajoran, Sailor Uranus, Gaiman’s Death, Cruella D’Ville)

Design, hung and ran 2 different plays for 2 performances every three weeks for nine weeks while teaching theatrical lighting

Ran around the 16th St Mall (pedestrian mall in downtown Denver) in costume, in a Dr. Who larp dodging mundane shoppers and shooting at each other with Chiquita bananas.
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This list are ones I think no one has done but I could be wrong:
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Owned a pony as a child

Was in charge of grinding hamburger as a child

Plucked chickens and stuffed the cut up pieces into milk cartons

Spend 6 days in an enneagram intensive

BA in General Studies (officially a BA in Arts and Humanities with a focus in Theatre, a focus in Art, a minor in Physics, a minor in Math)

Managed to get a B in a intro to Quantum class with understanding only three lectures (the first, the last, and one giving by a TA). Managed to turn a D on a test to an A by showing the prof that I really did do the questions correctly and deserved partial credit for one math error. Four tests, A,D,A,D = B for the class.

In school full time uninterrupted for 20 years (the final three included summer school)
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I can’t believe what I am doing. I am reaching heights of fear and being scared so far past scared shitless that scared shitless looks like a comfortable place to be in comparison.

I must have tremendous faith and trust just to continue to open my eyes moment to moment. To continue breathing. To move in any direction instead of quiting and closing everything down or quiting just everything. I don’t know how I am doing it. I am amazed that I am as functional as I have been and seem to continue to be. I don’t know what is driving this, why I am willing to keep doing it. I am told I will be much stronger and a much better person when I get through all this. That what I am going through is a good thing and that I am growing. It doesn’t feel good. It feels damaging and painful and wrong. And still I do it, still I go forward, still I watch and observe things I don’t want to see, still I peel back another layer of my psyche and the crud that lies beneath. I want to run and still I stay and work some more.

I know what I am doing is good, I believe it very deeply. But it feels like hell. And feeling is what I have avoided for most of my life. I have always been able to feel, probably too much so and it usually hurts. And I haven’t been able to stand the pain of it. I haven’t been able to even admit the pain of it. I am beginning to find out what I do and have done to avoid it at all costs. And that hurts too.

Part of the reason I can deal is because I put it away and not deal with it. But I wanted to write this out so that when I am playing the Queen of D’Nile (and I am learning how good I am at playing that particular Queen) I will realize that this does go on. To log it so I am not so surprised by it. Even now, I am losing sight of how scared I was, things are beginning to take on a more normal scale. I know I will be there again, and I am beginning to learn that I might be able to handle it. I am not sure I am comfortable with that information. It is suppose to be a good thing but it is scary in itself.

This living the examined life is the shits. I have powerful tools to view into the reality of myself and it is hard to deal with what I am finding. And I know I must face it to grow. I feel like I am fighting a many front war in most of the aspects of my life. And the tools I have are no longer as effective. It is a little hard to believe in the Wizard when you have looked behind the curtain. My little tricks and practices for dealing with things have gotten a bit transparent and therefore don’t function as well. A quote from Joan of Arcadia – illusion must be broken so that it can be replaced by something deeper. I am shattering a number of illusions and trying to find things and tools and practices to replace them.

It is not easy. It is hard and painful and a long and involved process. For some reason I seem to be committed to it. I don’t understand where that commitment comes from. It isn’t something I have seen in me before. But it appears to be there none the less.

If you feel you should comment on this post, be very very careful. This is not a light post for me.

And now to think about something completely different. Good think I have something like 20 hours of TiVo to distract me. Tra la la laa.

Your Brain Usage Profile:

I took this once and got the following results.
Auditory : 50%
Visual : 50%
Left : 61%
Right : 38%

This seems pretty close but I did accidentally skip a question. Then the browser got wiggy and I couldn’t get the analysis.

So I took it again on a different computer and got the following:
Auditory : 40%
Visual : 60%
Left : 47%
Right : 52%

This doesn’t seem so close. Makes me question the validity of the test when the results can be this varied. But then again, maybe being so near the middle on both of them, they swap back and forth and the difference in the results are not that large.
analysis

Has anyone heard/know of the band Duhks? They are out of Canada and have an album coming out like Tuesday. The description I heard was a band with a banjo, a fiddle, and a mosh pit. The radio played one of their songs and I like it.

Figured I would share and see what people might know.

They have a website with some mp3s on it. Took awhile for them to download/start. The first two sort of sound like a session at the Plough, The Leather Winged Bat is like the one I heard this morning.